ENGL 215 - Thinking with Renaissance Literature

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
How do we know what we think we know? What are the limits of human knowledge? Can we “think” more than one thing at the same time? The early modern era is often credited with the “rebirth” of classical knowledge, but it was also an era poised between religion and science, dream vision and empirical proof, credulity and doubt. Fittingly, many of its canonical works-Hamlet, Doctor Faustus, Utopia, Paradise Lost, Montaigne’s Essays, Descartes’ Meditations, Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly-offer dramatic attempts to sort through questions of knowledge. The course will read deeply in these and other works that help us think about thinking. In the process, we will encounter some of the many competing knowledge systems of the early modern period: indigenous knowledge, Baconian induction, hermeticism (magic and the occult), skepticism, humanism, and more. We will consider why such an intellectual culture was also such a poetic one, tracking forms of thought unique to literary devices like metaphor. At the same time, we will consider the ways in which Renaissance knowledge was not just a cerebral or philosophical pursuit, but also took place in the context of colonial extraction, in the face of the Inquisition, and often at the expense of raced, gendered, and surveilled bodies. Above all, considering literature’s special intimacy to both knowledge and selfhood, we will wonder with Descartes about what it means to say “I think, therefore I am.”

Prerequisites: One other 200-level English class.